Mercy Technology Services to offer data backup as service

Cloud-based approach will provide disaster recovery capabilities to small and medium-sized hospitals.


Later this spring, Mercy Technology Services plans to offer a cloud-based service that will enable disaster recovery and backup for healthcare organizations.

The technology arm of the 40-hospital Mercy healthcare system, Mercy Technology Services (MTS) plans to use the Commvault Data Platform as the technology backbone for the service.

MTS says it will offer disaster recovery and backup as a service (DR ad BaaS) to small and medium-sized hospitals and other healthcare organizations. The initiative will apply “holistic data management strategies” to give those organizations quick, easy and secure protection and recovery of mission-critical data in the event of a problem.

MTS hosts about 1,200 applications for Mercy, including its Epic electronic health record system. The system’s technology arm also hosts Epic’s EHR for other hospitals and health systems that are not affiliated with Mercy. MTS also provides healthcare cloud, managed services, Epic optimization and healthcare analytics as IT services.

The cloud-based data recovery and backup service can be used by any provider organization, no matter which electronic records system they are using, MTS executives say.

"We understand, perhaps better than any other cloud provider, the need to safeguard health care data, recover it on a moment's notice and navigate the complexities of privacy regulation," says Scott Richert, Mercy's vice president of enterprise infrastructure. "Whether it's a cyberthreat like ransomware or a natural disaster like a hurricane, fire or flood, healthcare can't afford to be caught on its heels. With a solution like this, hospital IT staff can stop worrying about data availability and compliance, and focus on more strategic projects that improve patient care."

MTS plans to offer multiple options to meet a hospital's specific requirements, using Commvault's data management platform to back up data to a cloud located at MTS's HIPAA, SSAE 16 and SOC2-compliant data centers. The plan is to encrypt data both in transit and at rest.

Both hospital IT staff and MTS's IT experts can use the service to initiate, monitor and maintain backup operations, as well as perform on-demand data restoration on secure landing zones. By providing IT staff with the ability to validate backups at any time and conduct restoration themselves, they’ll save time on backup operations and data management, MTS executives say.

"With today's data volumes and privacy regulation, hospitals have to find creative ways to secure data that doesn't break the bank," said Ananth Balasubramanian, general manager of Commvault's Healthcare Solutions Group. "Cloud DR and Backup services from Mercy help hospitals get the latest in data protection technologies while eliminating hassles of onsite disk and tape backup; plus, they shrink the costs and risks associated with backing up data on in-house infrastructure."

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